A selection of weekly articles by top Bahamian commentators.

February 2014

February 26, 2014

Not one, not two, but three celebrity scientists will make special appearances in Nassau next week.

Dr David Campbell, Dr Sylvia Earle and Glenn Olsen will deliver keynotes at the Bahamas Natural History Conference hosted by the College of The Bahamas and the Bahamas National Trust March 3-7.

Since 1991 Campbell has been a professor of biology, chair of environmental studies and Henry R. Luce Professor in Nations and the Global Environment at Grinnell College, Iowa. Campbell spent part of his childhood on Eleuthera. He has a graduate degree in biology from the University of Michigan and a doctorate from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Many will remember him as the executive director of the Bahamas National Trust from 1974 to 1977. His career in the Bahamas accumulated in the publication of The Ephemeral Islands - the first natural history of the archipelago to be published since the 1800s.

Campbell has conducted field research in Antarctica, Africa, Asia and Amazonia and has written several award-winning books about his experiences.

Dr Sylvia Earle is an American oceanographer who, since 1998, has been a National Geographic explorer-in-residence. She obtained her graduate degrees from Duke University in North Carolina.

In the 1980s she conducted trials in a deep sea submersible off Lee Stocking Island in the Exumas and was later appointed chief scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

An expert on the impact of oil spills, Earle led several research trips during the Persian Gulf War in 1991 to assess environmental damage caused by Iraq's destruction of Kuwaiti oil wells. She was also called to consult during the Deepwater Horizon well blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

From 1998 to 2002 she led the Sustainable Seas Expeditions, a five-year programme to study the United States National Marine Sanctuary, and In 2009 launched Mission Blue, which aims to establish marine protected areas (dubbed "hope spots") around the globe.

Glenn Olsen is the National Audubon Society’s chair in Bird Conservation and Public Policy. He led efforts that helped rescue the California condor from the brink of extinction, and has spearheaded major wetland restoration and protection projects in the United States. Olson advances international bird conservation by building capacity in both Audubon's programmes as well as collaborating with partner organisations like the BNT.

Local reptile expert and past BNT president Sandra Buckner will also make a presentation on the History of Discovering Reptiles and Amphibians in The Bahamas. And Prime Minister Perry Christie will officially open the conference at an evening reception at the Atlantis Resort on Monday.

The conference will feature 66 presenters on a wide variety of topics. Space is limited..

Google 'downtown redevelopment’ and you will find zillions of web pages focusing on one city after another - from Miami to Manhattan to Toronto and almost every place in between. Even Las Vegas has a downtown revitalisation programme, although the city was originally just a cattle ranch and wasn't incorporated until the 1900s.

This phenomenon came about due to major changes in urban environments over the past 60-odd years - office and retail activity today is much more dispersed than in earlier times. But despite their precipitous decline, town centres still form an important part of a community’s identity, for one reason or another. Revitalisation programmes are an effort to rebalance the urban economy and stem the loss of historic districts.

We can clearly see the problem right here on New Providence. The city of Nassau (not just the statutory limits) stretches from Bay Street to Wulff Road and from the Eastern Parade to Nassau Street, just beyond the long-vanished Western Parade. It's decline as a thriving city centre has been attributed to the removal of the public market from downtown, the construction of outlying shopping malls, and a population shift to residential suburbs.

Cynics have also laid much of the blame on the long-running political vendetta between a predominantly black government and the mostly white merchant princes who once held sway over Bay Street. But that is a gross distortion of the current reality, which is perhaps best characterised by the Finlayson family's ownership of Solomon's Mines.

February 23, 2014

There is a political saying that if you see a turtle balanced atop a fencepost, it didn’t get there by itself. One moral of the axiom is that if one views something in politics that seems untoward, there’s a high probability that it has been manufactured to benefit certain interests.

Dr. Duane Sands understands the axiom, especially after indicating last week that he was considering running for Leader of the FNM.

Within hours of his indication, the highly capable and viable contender for the leadership was derided in the print media, on Facebook and elsewhere online, a likely a coordinated attack by someone given to such tactics.

The good doctor, among the best medical minds in the country, should not be deterred by those less gifted and less accomplished.

Meanwhile, watch during the course of 2014 for a confluence of contrivances, often by strange political bedfellows, to derail the upward political trajectory of Long Island MP Loretta Butler Turner.

February 18, 2014

If you are like most Bahamians you probably don’t know or care much about iguanas.

These large, plant-eating lizards were part of the Lucayan diet long before the arrival of Europeans, but so few are left these days - in just a handful of remote locations - that they are the subject of intense scientific interest. This is especially so on San Salvador, where an academic field station has operated for decades.

The southern Bahamian iguana (whose scientific name is Cyclura rileyi) is one of the most threatened of the West Indian rock iguanas. It is now confined to small, uninhabited cays in the Exumas, and around San Salvador and Crooked Island. The few hundred that survive on the offshore cays of San Salvador are considered critically endangered.

But although they are protected by international and Bahamian law, these lizards are an attraction for poachers. In 1999 two Florida men were convicted for smuggling Exuma iguanas to the US pet trade. In 2009, a pair of American tourists was prosecuted for barbecuing iguanas in the Exumas, and just a few weeks ago two Romanian women were caught at London’s Heathrow airport trying to smuggle 13 San Salvador iguanas to a buyer in Germany.

February 11, 2014

During an informal discussion at a science conference on Abaco recently, the question of recycling came up, with one participant insisting that even the local breweries’ much-touted bottle re-use programme was not working.

So I decided to take a look at all the recycling efforts in the country today. Surprisingly, there’s a lot more going on than you might imagine.

First, a little context. These days about a third of the 250 million tons of trash Americans create each year is recycled or composted, compared to about 40 per cent of the average waste each European generates.

This puts the US somewhere in the middle of the major countries (United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France and Japan) in terms of landfill disposal. Only a few countries – Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Austria and Denmark – have been able to phase out landfilling.

But for small island states like the Bahamas, both land and cover material are at a premium. And landfill management is often inadequate, leading to frequent toxic fires, pollution of the water table, overproduction of greenhouse gases, and the spread of vermin. And illegal dumping creates obvious problems for tourist-oriented countries like ours.

February 10, 2014

The seismic crashing sound Bahamians heard over the past fortnight or so was the collapse of what was the already fractured and waning credibility of the Christie administration less than two years into its mandate.

The thunderous crash was followed by laughter and mocking by a mass chorus of Bahamians unable to contain their disbelief and derision following Prime Minister Perry Christie’s convenient regret at having called a referendum cum poll on regulating the numbers business and his failure to fulfil his promise to regain a majority interest in BTC for the Government of The Bahamas.

There is a direct line running between the referendum debacle to the BTC charade. They are both spectacular failures of policy and politics for Christie and the PLP, built on a Mount Everest of failures by a government in freefall.